“Relishing in its ability to wrong foot and thrill right to its final moments, ‘Bacurau’ is an unashamedly cinematic experience, with its makers playing in a sandbox of tropes and expectations, subverting them to put forward a radical and wholly essential message.”
“In these increasingly confusing times, taking solace anywhere we can is more important than ever, and it’s impressively weird, intelligent movies like ‘Sea Fever’ that offer such comfort.”
“The female gaze is strong in ‘The Other Lamb,’ lovingly capturing Cassidy’s delicate, open features particularly when they begin twisting into something resembling anger…”
“In order to fully engage with horror films, it’s important to look at the monster and the world that’s being upended by that monster.”
“Not quite comedies, not entirely horror movies and not normal family films, Dante’s work continues to impress with the layers each work reveals over time, a key factor in their lasting power.”
“The problem with ‘Dark Whispers: Volume 1’ is the same as with any horror anthology — the stories are only as good as what’s come before.”
“Whannell’s ‘The Invisible Man’ is an absolute banger, and stands tall as the most spectacular evolution of the story to hit the big screen.”
“Great art has every piece in intimate communion with the art as a whole. ‘Gretel & Hansel’ takes an elemental approach to the folklore, gasping with the fears of the original material while exhaling a new mystique of its own.”
“Ferrara throws everything at ‘Siberia,’ turning it into a playground for emotive relation. But it is Dafoe, his muse, who so thoroughly brings the audience along with the randomness…”
“Franz and Fiala scale down Kubrick’s more expansive vision, and the result offers its own kind of skin-crawling satisfaction.”
“A thrilling, gloriously gory and gleefully simple exercise in cyberpunk nastiness, led by a crew of done-with-this-shit action movie icons, ‘VFW’ is a relentlessly entertaining riot.”
“‘Scare Me’ takes a while to get going, awkwardly finding its footing through its opening scenes, but when it settles into the long night of storytelling in the cabin, Ruben’s debut feature becomes a total delight.”
“‘Color Out of Space’ is one of the weirdest, most disgusting, thought-provoking and provocative releases of the year…”
“There is a danger and dynamism to 20s cinema which was gradually eradicated by the standardisation of production processes.”
“Playing with of-the-moment vocabulary familiar on college campuses, the latest ‘Black Christmas’ upends several slasher conventions, even if the film is a step down from the director’s excellent ‘Always Shine.'”
“Lewton’s insights into both childhood and adult inner personal conflicts are legacies which deserve recognition in the foundational history of horror, both for psychological thrillers and fantasy films.”
“In a weird way, Flanagan might have inadvertently made the best X-Men movie to date.”
“‘The Witch’ may be the superior film, but ‘The Lighthouse’ shows Eggers growing by leaps and bounds as a storyteller and visual stylist.”
“This is a world where faith, governments, businesses, families and the other institutions humans have built will all crumble, just like human bodies, which will inevitably succumb to their fragility and fall victim to total destruction.”
“As a love letter to a cinematic wave of films that were (and are) often dismissed as style devoid of substance, ‘Knife+Heart’ triumphs in both story and genre evolution.”